Roma Tre - Studi del Territorio/ Environmental Humanities - Master Universitario di Primo Livello - completed

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REplicate 2020 is an EU funded smart city project, shared by medium-sized cities across the continent, to date, the last international partnership of its kind. As political uncertainty shakes Europe, the smart city acts as a unifying framework in partner cities Florence and Bristol, despite their different characteristics. For Florence, it offers the chance to restore the fortunes of perfect Renaissance urbanism, repairing its current condition, perceived as below European standards; for Bristol, an occasion to secure its established modern, efficient image, based on a legacy of trade and manufacture. Both cities are sites of technological experimentation, but they are not perfectly synchronized or symmetrical. Therefore the proposed research aims to understand, through comparative study, the city of the future in the making, interviewing experts, analyzing data collection and processing and sharing of operational knowledge between cities, and its effects on urban planning. The study I propose connects three main areas: urban geography, surveillance studies, and the image-data complex. It's main goal is to define the 'smart' city as a field of perception that stimulates geographical knowledge - through the role of experts - and is in turn transformed by it - through policy makers. In doing so, the dissertation aims to answer three questions: - How is geographical knowledge about the city produced via sensors and infrastructures? How is data collected?- How is this knowledge, expressed actively by scientific imaging, deployed locally? Can it be successfully relocated? What planning urgencies does it address?- What image of the city is being constructed, right now, through the trope of 'smartness'? How does it effect Europe as a geo-political assemblage?The proposed research aims to understand how geographical knowledge about the city is generated, once big data have been collected through sensors and Wifi access points, disseminated in the urban area. To do so, I foresee to collect papers and scientific reports to complete a critique of their data collection methodologies. Another crucial part of this inquiry consists in understanding how this information is stored and treated, in order to extract readable knowledge about the city. Therefore, visualisations devices, like maps and gazetteers, will be studied according to critical cartography principles. The last questions to be answered concerns how experts deploy such insights, to structure operational masterplans and blueprints that will have material impact on the future development of the areas being studied. To comprehend and describe how such technologically informed knowledge is translated in an operative plan, experts from proper institutions - like Assessorato Urbanistica in Florence and the Development Control Committee in Bristol - will be interviewed.This research will grant insight in the operational active core of one of the leading programmes concerned with smart urbanism in Europe. Moreover, because of political uncertainty around Brexit, no other EU funded project of this kind is being prepared, after this one is completed in 2021. As sensing technologies and big data collection and sharing are meant to become more and more common in the next decade, the proposed study offers a new approach in the already prolific field of smart urbanism, since, as to date, no study is available focused on the authors of this technological revolution in urban design.